Took the Author Quizzy Thingy

Anyone who's read the bulk of my journal won't be surprised to learn that I am:


George Orwell


What classically cool poet or writer are you?
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Regime Change Begins at Home

In Genesis, there is a story wherein Jacob's daughter Dinah is raped by the local leader, who then seeks to legitimize his actions after the fact by asking for her hand. Jacob and his sons grant this request on the condition that this leader, and all the men in his jurisdiction become circumsised. When the wounds are at their most painful, Two of Jacob's sons, Simeon and Levi, attack, slaying the whole town.

When Jacob chides them, it is not for the wanton death and destruction they have wrought, but rather for the political issues that might arise. Judah and Levi then demand of Jacob "What, were we just supposed to let them get away with raping our sister?"

I find this story very interesting in light of current world events. The fact that Jacob does not condemn them for killing everyone in the town as such suggests that he saw the justice, if not the political expediency, of their actions. But how was it just to kill townspeople who had no hand in the rape? There is only reading I can give, and that is that the people of this town, in consenting to be governed by a rapist, show themselves to be a culture that values rape. The overall message is "If your leader is a menace; deal with him because you may be killed if someone else has to."

Indeed this is the very principle that Bush applied in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now we Americans are in a strange position. We have a leader who has broken treaties, refused to participate in world efforts to reduce global warming, or participate in the world court. We have a leader who aims to starve our poor and deny them medical care, who holds foreign nationals indefinitely and without charges, and who is doing everything in his power to make the country, even the world, a vast playground of profit for a small circle of family business friends.

How much longer will Bush's unilateralist rape of the world, whether economic, environmental, or military, be tolerated? How much time do we have until others in the world community determine that it is time we were liberated from the Bush regime, and how many of us will survive such a liberation? How much happier would Dinah have been, had the people in whose land she stayed remembered, as we must today, that Regime Change Begins at Home?